Friday, October 31, 2008

Hail hail to the good timesBecause rock has got the right of wayWe ain't no legends, ain't no causeWe're just living for today. from "For Those about to Rock (We Salute You)"

The University of Alabama Crimson Tide football team has not won a game in the month of November in three years. That’s nine games lost not only to the likes of LSU but also to Louisiana-Monroe. It also includes the current losing streak to Auburn, who hopefully won’t fire Tuberville before this year’s game—but more on that at another time.

Throughout this season, the Great Leader has repeated his mantra of limited attention, the powerful nihilism of dominating the moment. One’s reward is the fulfillment of one’s ability in the present, not in the achievement of a future goal. That’s headbending stuff for most people, much less football players.

But if last year’s loss to a Sun Belt team proved anything though, it’s that, for all the bruises and breaks and blood, football is a mental game too.

A pet peeve: proselytizers—religious, artistic, or otherwise. So I ask forgiveness for what follows:

AC/DC’s new album, Black Ice, so thoroughly blows me away that I encourage you to seek it out for yourself. It’s impressive, and not a little absurd, that the band is still around at all, much less manufacturing (and that’s exactly what they are doing; AC/DC is not so much a band as a business conglomerate of musical influence) some of their finest work.

Perhaps they are representatives of an embassy for some nation of pure rock buried beneath the Great Barrier Reef or maybe they biomechanically engineered astronauts from some equadistanced orbiting alter-Earth where everyone’s grandfather is Chuck Berry.

No matter. Whatever they are, they rock.

Upping the absurdity ante is that nothing about the album leads one to believe it should be as good as it is. It’s essentially the same riffs and same grunts that they’ve been peddling for three decades, yet rather than sounding dated, the album feels like your favorite record from last summer that you played the hell out of and just want to hear one more time.

OK, two more. Maybe three.

It is, of course, possible that AC/DC sounds fresher today than they did ten years ago (or longer) because the competition can’t keep up with them. That’s the benefit of glorified hedonism, one assumes.

The same lens can be used to view Alabama’s football team, were one so inclined. Is Alabama undefeated because they’re so good or because the competition was worse that people estimated? Are there better teams left on Alabama’s schedule?